[1] Decolonising Art History - Continuing the Conversation
From: Amanda Sciampacone
Date: 6 Oct 2025

The Association for Art History's (AAH) dedicated resource portal on antiracism and decolonial approaches, established in 2020 during the global pandemic in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, represents a key milestone in our collective efforts. Formed by Higher Education Committee (HEC) members and supported by Art History Journal’s landmark 43rd issue ‘Decolonizing Art History’, these initiatives, alongside continuing discussions at the 2025 Annual Conference, demonstrate both how far we have come and how much further we need to go in decolonising our field. As susan pui san lok observes, a decolonised art history would be: ‘De-centred, de-territorialised, de-disciplined; heterogeneous, contested, contradictory, confused, confusing; multiple, multitudinous, multilingual, translingual, untranslatable; diasporic, migratory, translocal, transhemispheric, oceanic, archipelagic; uncertain, indefinite, unstable, transforming, transformative.’ (2020)

This panel, convened by AAH HEC members, will bring together the latest practices, provocations, research, and pedagogical strategies on decolonising art history and visual culture. We invite contributions that explore what decolonising means, currently and in the future. We want to hear about what you are reading, writing and thinking about, and welcome your suggestions for moving forward.

The panel welcomes both shorter (8-minute) and longer (20-minute) presentations. Please indicate your preference with your submission.

Submit your Paper via this form: https://app.box.com/s/e1r529tdk6ef6ycfc6gqkxnry9bn4e0u. Please download, complete and send it directly to the Session Convenor(s) below by Sunday 2 November 2025:

Rina Arya, University of Hull, R.Aryahull.ac.uk
Claire Moran, Queen’s University Belfast, c.moranqub.ac.uk
Ceren Özpınar, University of Brighton, c.ozpinarbrighton.ac.uk
Amanda Sciampacone, The Open University, amanda.sciampaconeopen.ac.uk

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[2] Patterning Worlds: Non-Figurative Art in Cross-Cultural Perspective
From: Sanja Savkic Sebek
Date: 7 Oct 25

The session “Patterning Worlds: Non-Figurative Art in Cross-Cultural Perspective” will examine how abstraction, repetition, and patterned forms structure space, articulate relationships, and shape visual experience. We encourage reflections on how non-figurative strategies operate within wider cultural and aesthetic contexts, offering alternative modes of perception, organization, and knowledge-making across time, place, and media.

This session welcomes 20-minute papers followed by 5-minute discussions from scholars in art history, anthropology, archaeology and related fields. It aims to foster dialogue on the capacities of non-figurative art to shape perception, organise social and ritual space, and articulate cultural frameworks.

Submit your Paper via this form: https://app.box.com/s/e1r529tdk6ef6ycfc6gqkxnry9bn4e0u
Please download, complete and send it directly to the Session Convenor(s) below by Sunday 2 November 2025:

Sanja Savkic Sebek, Sainsbury Research Unit for the Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas (University of East Anglia), S.Savkic-Sebekuea.ac.uk
Bat-ami Artzi, Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino (Chilean Museum of Pre-Columbian Art), bartzimuseoprecolombino.cl
Felipe Armstrong, Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino (Chilean Museum of Pre-Columbian Art), farmstrongmuseoprecolombino.cl

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[3] Intermedia Dialogues in Art and Architecture
From: Defne Oruç
Date: 9 Oct 25

This session explores intermedia practices in art, where “the life of the (moving) image,” as Ethel-Ruth Tawe (2025) notes, follows the movement of people and communities, forced or otherwise. It draws on postcolonial and decolonial theory to interrogate the displacement of materials, techniques, and affects across a wide range of temporalities and geographies marked by the circulation of colonial artefacts to contemporary interventions in memory. The Adoration of the Magi (ca. 1695–1700) attests to the transoceanic dialogues between Mexico and Asia during the early-modern period, which favoured the extension of lacquering and inlaying, accompanied by the continuation of pre-Hispanic techniques. The builders of the Cathedral of San Cristobal (1748-1777) in Cuba incarnated Francesco Borromini’s designs in local coral stone. Scaling intermedia to curatorial practice today, Khristine Khouri and Rasha Salti’s research project on museums in exile, Past Disquiet, reactivates the history of international solidarity movements through artistic alliances. In different editions of Past Disquiet or the exhibition Otra Orilla (2024), intermedial thinking produces critical responses to how art and life necessarily converge. These examples invite us to think through manifold networks in which the repurposing of materials and motifs encodes differing levels of resistance to colonial powers. What kind of ideological transformations occur when images are spoken and held, matter translated in time? How do intermedia practices engage displacement as a means of registering moments of rupture and anticolonial struggle?

For information on how to submit: https://forarthistory.org.uk/intermedia-dialogues-in-art-and-architecture/
Submit your Paper via this form: https://app.box.com/s/e1r529tdk6ef6ycfc6gqkxnry9bn4e0u
Please email your proposals before November 2, 2025, to:
Defne Oruç, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA dorucwisc.edu
Maryluna Santos-Giraldo, Tulane University, USA msantosgiraldotulane.edu

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[4] Eighteenth-Century Italian Art and Artists in Global Contexts
From: Arlene Leis
Date: 9 Oct 25

This session invites papers that consider the work of eighteenth-century Italian artists and artists living in Italy, in the context of newly available trans-cultural influences and sources of visual and material culture. As curiosity about the wider world exploded, the eighteenth-century witnessed global movements of materials, techniques and makers to a larger extent than ever before. Tourists and artists travelled to Italy and visited academies, monuments, museums and private collections, while Italian artists travelled outside Italian borders to test new art markets and gain patrons. Characterized by voyages of exploration, new technologies, scientific discoveries, political upheaval and nascent industrialization, the cross-cultural encounters taking place between individuals at that time, along with the mobility of commodities and ideas, prompted artists to experiment with new subject matter and visual languages within and outside of the Italian peninsula.

Moving beyond isolated narratives, this panel aims to broaden scholarly perspectives by focusing on Italian encounters—real or imagined—with other populations throughout the world to study how those exchanges were expressed through visual and material cultures, including painting, sculpture, print, design, architecture and decorative arts. We invite a broad range of 20-minute papers, particularly addressing topics such as: spaces of exchange, Indigenous knowledge, social networks, colonial encounters and the construction of an exotic consciousness, Grand Tour travel, collections, collectors and patronage, global religious encounters, commercial interests, new media and materials.

You need to provide a title and abstract (250 words maximum) for a 20-minute paper (unless otherwise specified), your name and institutional affiliation (if any).
Please make sure the title is concise and reflects the contents of the paper because the title is what appears online, in social media and in the digital programme. You should receive an acknowledgement of receipt of your submission within two weeks. A template form is provided (link: https://app.box.com/s/e1r529tdk6ef6ycfc6gqkxnry9bn4e0u).

Please email your paper proposals direct to the session convenor(s) by 2 November 2025:
Arlene Leis, Independent Scholar, aleis914gmail.com
Miriam Al Jamil, Independent Scholar, mauvemiriamgmail.com

Please see conference websites below for more details:
- Italian Art Society: https://www.italianartsociety.org/2025/10/cfp-ias-sponsored-session-at-aah/
- Association for Art History: https://forarthistory.org.uk/events/cfp-association-for-art-history-2026-annual-conference/